William Dunlap

Fine Artist

• Born: February 19, 1766
• Birthplace: Perth Amboy, New Jersey
• Died: September 28, 1839
• Place of death: New York, New York

Other Literary Forms

Many of William Dunlap’s nondramatic works have earned for him solid status among students of literature and visual art. His biography of his contemporary Charles Brockden Brown, America’s first major gothic novelist, remains a standard reference tool. Dunlap’s other biographical works—a shorter piece on Brown, sketches of Gilbert Stuart and Thomas Abthorpe Cooper, and a book on George Frederick Cooke—are valuable portraits by one who was on the scene for many of the events presented. Because of his career as a painter, Dunlap’s A History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States (1834) also remains a work worth consulting for this aspect of the early cultural history of the United States.

Still more important is A History of American Theatre (1832). Dunlap’s account of the American theater from the 1790’s through the first third of the nineteenth century is at times blurred by faulty memory. Nevertheless, before the work of George O. Seilhamer, George C. D. Odell, Arthur Hornblow, and Arthur Hobson Quinn, Dunlap offered a rich history of American drama. His firsthand account also furnishes an autobiography of its author, and altogether, it remains a classic in the annals of the American stage.

Dunlap also wrote verse, and several of his short stories, published in periodicals during the final decade of his life, merit critical attention. Many of his periodical pieces were unsigned, making definite attribution difficult. Dunlap intended to bring out a collected edition of his plays, in ten volumes. Only three volumes of The Dramatic Works of William Dunlap appeared, however, the first in 1806, the following two in 1816.

Achievements

Customarily designated the “Father of American Drama,” William Dunlap lived a long life through a period of extraordinary historical change in American culture. He was the first American playwright who turned to writing plays and managing theaters for a livelihood. His output of original plays and adaptations or translations from foreign dramas adds up to more than fifty titles. He gained considerable fame, as well as the love of many who were connected with early American theater, during his management of playhouses in Philadelphia and New York. Dunlap also deserves praise for his interest in and knowledge of German language and literature, as a result of which he was able to bring plays by August von Kotzebue, Friedrich Schiller, and J. H. D. Zschokke to the American stage at the turn of the nineteenth century. Such fare continued to be popular for many years. Dunlap also adapted from French theater, particularly from the then fairly new melodrama. His own pleasure in melodramatic and sensational scenes informs many of his original productions; he adapted many sentimental-sensational plays for his theaters because he well comprehended the desires of his audiences. His striving in his writing and in his theaters for high standards of morality, however, countered common tendencies to cater mainly to less admirable impulses of audiences eager for thrills and sexually suggestive titillation. At times, too, Dunlap’s intense patriotism, centered on his admiration for George Washington, saved his own plays from running overmuch into sleazy melodramatics. On the other hand, that overt patriotism emphatically dates these plays and limits their appeal today, except as valuable literary history.

Dunlap as dramatist furnishes a curiosity in the accounts of anthologists and scholars of our national literature, in that most collections of eighteenth and early nineteenth century American plays have featured only André. Richard Moody, however, in his anthology Dramas from the American Theatre, 1762-1909 (1966), provides other specimens from Dunlap’s canon, The Glory of Columbia—Her Yeomanry! and A Trip to Niagara. The first is a reworking of André; the second demonstrates Dunlap’s experimental combination of dramatic and visual-arts techniques. Dunlap’s interests as playwright and painter make such a blending understandable.

Dunlap’s decided inclination toward the gothic, obvious in Leicester, Fountainville Abbey, and other plays and clearly coursing through works in which other concerns are primary, has been sadly neglected, although this interest led to some of Dunlap’s outstanding achievements. The early historians of American literature tended to follow too closely in the footsteps of Ralph Waldo Emerson, championing a distinctly national literary art. As a result, they generally regarded gothicism as a product of European decadence, a genre not conducive to the production of a genuinely indigenous American literature. Dunlap himself recognized the excesses to which literary gothicism was prone, as is evident in his short stories: There, as often as not, such exaggerations were subjected to hoax treatment. In the manner of Washington Irving and Edgar Allan Poe, Dunlap deftly mingled horror and humor.

Dunlap’s partiality toward the gothic has not been the only aspect of his work to be noted unfavorably by critics and historians. Dunlap’s twin interests, the theater and painting, have often been used against him by those who believe that he achieved slightly less than greatness in either, simply because he was engaged in two careers. Partly as a result of such prejudices, Dunlap’s work as a playwright has been undervalued. At a time when bombast clouded much of American literature, Dunlap experimented with vernacular speech on the stage. He managed to effect compelling characters by such means. His practical experience of theater management gave him a command of his medium that many of his contemporaries did not enjoy, as, for example, the career of James Nelson Barker reveals. All his limitations notwithstanding, Dunlap merits greater attention than he has received from students of American drama.

Biography

William Dunlap, the only child of Samuel and Margaret Sargeant Dunlap, spent his early years in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, where he was born. The wealth of his father, a merchant specializing in the china and looking-glass trade, enabled the boy to receive a fine education. He was particularly fortunate in studying classical literature with the elderly Thomas Bartow, whose store of learning in the classics enriched the mind of his young friend. In the spring of 1777, Samuel Dunlap, whose sympathies were Loyalist, moved his family to New York City, where William was first introduced to stage drama. This interest was to continue throughout his life, and although reverses in fortune later dogged Dunlap, he never lost his enthusiasm for any aspect of the stage. In 1783, after the close of the Revolutionary War, the Dunlaps returned to Perth Amboy. Shortly thereafter, during the convening of Congress at Princeton, Dunlap first saw George Washington, and during the winter of 1783-1784, the young man painted a portrait of his hero.

From 1784 to August, 1787, Dunlap spent time in London, studying painting with Benjamin West and increasing his acquaintance with playgoing and with theater personages. Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s plays were among his favorites. Returning to the United States, Dunlap tried to establish himself as a portrait painter, but the theater soon came to be uppermost in his mind and work. The success of Royall Tyler’s The Contrast (pr. 1787) inspired Dunlap to create his own first play, a comedy entitled “The Modest Soldier: Or, Love in New York,” which was accepted by the American Company but never performed; the young playwright had failed to fashion parts suitable for the manager and his wife. Correcting that circumstance in his next work, The Father, written in 1788 and performed in 1789, Dunlap launched himself on a career as a dramatist that lasted for the next thirty years and made him famous. His experiments with numerous dramatic forms, his introduction of Kotzebue and other European playwrights to the American stage, and his career as a manager in Philadelphia and New York, as well as his ventures into painting (most notably portraits) and into other forms of writing, filled his life.

Dogged by financial misfortunes after he lost his fortune as a theater manager, Dunlap maintained a good temper, as well as the respect and love of a wide circle of friends. His marriage, in 1789, to Nabby Woolsey, of an old New York family, brought him into contact with many well-known figures of his day, including Timothy Dwight, his wife’s brother-in-law, who was to become president of Yale University. Always a social being, Dunlap also maintained connections with several literary clubs. The Friendly Club numbered among its members, in addition to Dunlap, many who shaped the cultural history of the United States during its early national period. Dunlap died in New York on September 28, 1839, after suffering a stroke.

Analysis

Possibly more than any other playwright of his age, William Dunlap has come down through chronicles of American drama, such as those of Arthur Hobson Quinn, Montrose J. Moses, and Oral Sumner Coad, as the author of a single play, André, although Quinn’s account in his history of early American drama does reveal other facets of Dunlap’s work. However, a number of Dunlap’s other works merit discussion.

The Father

The Father was Dunlap’s first play to be performed; it was also the second comedy by an American playwright to enjoy public notice. As such, it deserves examination as a follow-up to Tyler’s The Contrast. The Father still can entertain readers; its comic misunderstandings and mishaps, its portraiture of the typical Yankee character, and its lively dialogue retain their power to amuse.

The marriage of the Rackets has entered the doldrums; Mr. Racket believes that solace will come in the arms of country-bred Susannah, a pert household maid, while Mrs. Racket hopes to intensify her husband’s love by inciting him to jealousy of their friend, Ranter. Ranter, however, has designs on her sister, Caroline. At an inopportune moment, Colonel Duncan, guardian to the sisters, enters and discovers Mrs. Racket fainting into Ranter’s arms—and suspects the worst. The colonel and his servant, Cartridge, function, as Cartridge observes, like Laurence Sterne’s Mr. Toby Shandy and Corporal Trim from the novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent. (1759-1767), a tale abounding in comic high jinks such as Dunlap tries to approximate with American characters. Ultimately, a solid reunion of the Rackets is effected by means of the exposure of Ranter’s rascalities, the revelation that Caroline’s lover, the long-lost son of Colonel Duncan, is alive, and the proper disposition of Susannah to Dr. Quiescent, a comic figure who has provided relief to tempestuous or grave incidents.

The Father of an Only Child

Dunlap deftly revised this play into The Father of an Only Child, which was possibly never performed, although it certainly reads well and could be a lively performance piece. A more distinctly American tinge is emphasized by means of comic reference to the American Monthly Magazine, in the vernacular speech of some of the characters, principally the maid Susannah, and in diminishing the Latinate names (Dr. Quiescent becomes Dr. Tattle). The Rackets are still the bibulous Irishman who has an eye for the ladies, and the long-suffering, determined wife who wrongheadedly tries to use jealousy to regain her husband’s affections. The Colonel, renamed Campbell (his aide is renamed Platoon), with his concern for the only son he left to others long ago, gives the new title to the play. The background (the recent adoption of the United States Constitution) provides plausibility for the drunken revelry at the opening of the play. The menial, Jacob, adds to the cast a comic “Dutch” character, soon to become a stereotype in American plays. The outcome of this play is similar to that of The Father, except that Susannah is destined for Platoon.

Susannah’s speeches in particular are noteworthy for their colloquial flavor, as when she repulses Racket’s advances: “I’m a poor Yankee girl, and you are a rich town gentleman, and I’m sartin sich are no more fit to go together than a pumpkin and a pine-apple. New mister Platoon don’t go for higher than a good ripe ear of Indian corn, and a pumpkin needn’t be ashamed of coming upon the same table any day.” She remarks at this same juncture that “a body ought to keep company with a body’s likes. Some folk’s place is the keeping-room, and some folk’s place is the stirring-room.” Along with Platoon’s praise for Colonel Campbell freeing his slaves (Dunlap’s own action on his father’s death), such speeches serve to add homey, American touches to The Father of an Only Child. The exposure of the villainous servant’s machinations against his master—the long-lost lover of Mrs. Racket’s sister—in both versions suggests that European villainy is more vicious than the rather tame misdoings of Americans (the Rackets are new Americans). Ranter-Marsh-Rushport has his disguise stripped from him, and the revelation that he is the ne’er-do-well son whose misdeeds killed his clergyman father and whose ring is that of Caroline’s betrothed recalls the confusions of identity, duplicitous and otherwise, characteristic of the gothic romance so much in vogue at that time.

A Trip to Niagara

Similar comedies wherein misapprehension of motives furnishes the dramatic conflict are False Shame, adapted from Kotzebue, Thirty Years, adapted from Goubaux and Ducange, and Dunlap’s original A Trip to Niagara. In this last play, Dunlap put together suitable dramatic action to enhance a diorama or revolving set of scenery that moves the audience from New York Harbor to Catskill Landing, during which action the merits of the United States, as Dunlap’s audience knew it, were debated—to the final yielding to its excellences by the British antagonist. Too easily dismissed by critics, A Trip to Niagara is not poor dramatic art. The dialogue is spirited, the situation—of Amelia Wentworth’s lover having to win her brother to things American in order to marry her—is good comic material, and the portraiture of comic stage types (French, Irish, Yankee) is compelling. The dialects, especially the American colloquial (although John Bull, Amelia’s lover, merely impersonates a familiar Yankee figure), are well handled. Dunlap also presented the first serious portraiture of a black character of the American stage in Job Jerryson, who is a far cry from the amusing black minstrel who became a popular stage type during the nineteenth century. Despite Dunlap’s apparent writing of this play on commission, he managed to create a comedy of no mean order.

Leicester

Dunlap’s tragic muse also inspired him to write several plays of high quality; these tragedies often derive from gothic tradition. Leicester, Fountainville Abbey, Ribbemont (originally staged as The Mysterious Monk in 1796), and The Man of Fortitude abound in eerie scenery; foreboding characters and settings in equally mysterious situations; intense, emotion-filled scenes; and death—with accompanying moral loftiness triumphing. Derivative as it is from William Shakespeare’s Macbeth (pr. 1606)—itself an inspiration for gothic fiction—Leicester conveys splendidly the tensions of characters motivated by ambition, thwarted or illicit passion, and murderous impulses. The shifts in scenes, physical and psychological, through numerous shadows and glooms or fears and hysteria artistically support the strained verbal interchanges among the dramatis personae.

Fountainville Abbey

Fountainville Abbey, even more literary than historical in inspiration, was founded on Ann Radcliffe’s famous gothic novel, The Romance of the Forest (1791), and a play that was based on it, by the British dramatist James Boaden, Fountainville Forest (pr. 1794). Dunlap’s play, first performed in 1795, is another of his works that has been neglected in favor of historical-patriotic creation, although Elihu Hubbard Smith, thoroughly knowledgeable in cultural currents at the time, pronounced it the best tragedy he had seen in twenty years, adding that if Dunlap fulfilled his promise, he might well become the most respected dramatist of his time.

In Dunlap’s hands, the British sources are transmuted into exceptional verse drama. Fleeing creditors, La Motte, his wife, and his servant, old Peter, along with Adeline, a girl mysteriously brought along by La Motte, find shelter in abandoned Fountainville Abbey. The darkness and obscurity of that locale blend well with a seeming ghost—who in the end turns out to be old Peter harmlessly going to and fro—to produce a rational supernaturalism, after the manner of Radcliffe and akin to what Dunlap’s contemporary, the novelist Charles Brockden Brown, would soon purvey in his fiction. (Dunlap, however, should be credited with being the first American gothicist.) The wicked Marquis de Montalt, whom La Motte had attempted to rob, soon appears on the scene, lusts after Adeline, and then tries to browbeat La Motte into murdering the girl when he discovers that she is his niece, daughter of the brother and rightful marquis, whom he had murdered. In the end, justice and virtue triumph, but that happy conclusion occurs only after moments of great trauma. Adeline is restored to her rightful status, and with her wealth she will bring good fortune to La Motte as well. The Marquis unsuccessfully tries to commit suicide—and thus departs from his origins in Radcliffe and Boaden, wherein he does kill himself. La Motte, a man dogged by guilt, finally, and symbolically, is brought from darkness, in setting and spirit, to light and salvation. The backdrops are functional in enhancing the psychic upsets (more significant than physical action) in Fountainville Abbey.

Ribbemont

Dunlap’s poetic heights in Fountainville Abbey are not matched in Ribbemont. Reminiscent of the Romeo and Juliet situation of poisoning, this play of apparently illicit love and murder is marred by too many overstrained speeches and too little action.

Adaptations

The Man of Fortitude, The Stranger, The Italian Father, Don Carlos, and Abaellino, the Great Bandit—adaptations from older English or from German plays—contain fine scenes. They are interesting in that they exemplify types of stage fare, such as the gothic, the robber play, or the sentimental, much sought in the period of Dunlap’s career. Overall, however, these works do not measure up to the high standards achieved in dramas such as Leicester or Fountainville Abbey.

André

André, Dunlap’s best-known drama, though unsuccessful in its 1798 performance, reaches heights of psychological tension that are matched only in the gothic plays written shortly before, in the 1790’s. It has also appealed to those whose tastes in early American drama turn decidedly toward the patriotic. The plot is simple: Major John André, en route to Benedict Arnold, is captured and sentenced to hang as a spy against the American cause during the Revolution. He ultimately goes off to die after successive emotionally charged attempts to save him fail. The dramatic interest centers on delineating the psychological workings of those who argue for André’s life. Even George Washington finds admirable traits in André’s personality, although he realizes that to pardon him would be to encourage treason. The action of young Bland, André’s great friend, in throwing down his cockade before Washington, was hissed by the American audience on the opening-night performance, but his subsequent repentance of his rashness toned down the suggestion of treason in his anger. Dunlap did not observe strict historical accuracy in creating his play—only one, but the best, of several on the popular André theme. Documents reveal that the love affair between André and Honora, who in Dunlap’s play appears to plead for him, was romanticized by the playwright. He also invented the Blands, a mother and son who, in their pleadings, doubtless appealed to an American audience’s love of sentimentality.

The Glory of Columbia—Her Yeomanry!

The André theme is reworked in The Glory of Columbia—Her Yeomanry!, nine of the fifteen scenes of which were taken from André, but to no great advantage. As the title change suggests, the center of interest shifts from André, who in both plays recalls the villain-hero of many tragedies, to the common people of the United States. Dunlap’s handling of colloquial idiom is the single positive feature in this otherwise too fervently patriotic play, so blatantly calculated to wring the nationalistic hearts of American playgoers. Nevertheless, The Glory of Columbia—Her Yeomanry! was for some time revived each year to celebrate the Fourth of July.

Bibliography

Argetsinger, Gerald S. “Dunlap’s André: The Beginning of American Tragedy.” Players 49 (Spring, 1974): 62-64. Argetsinger demonstrates how André established Dunlap as the first major American dramatist and how it stands alone as the representative eighteenth century American tragedy.

Canary, Robert H. William Dunlap. New York: Twayne, 1970. Canary’s biography of Dunlap charts his emergence as representative of the artists who made a place for the arts in the new nation. Dunlap’s most important works are described together with the personal and critical principles that governed his work. Notes, references, and annotated bibliography.

Richards, Jeffrey H. Early American Drama. New York: Penguin Books, 1997. Richards presents selected early American plays, including Dunlap’s André, along with an introduction and bibliography for each.

Rinehart, Lucy. “Manly Exercises.” Early American Literature 36, no.2 (2001): 263-293. Johnson examines the intergenerational conflicts experienced by Dunlap and his contemporaries, children of the revolution. Includes analysis of several plays.